


drink the sun like wine

by cryptidqueerreads



Category: The Last Hours Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: F/F, I am gay and she deserves better, also if cassie gets to use fire metaphors for everything then I get to use water, and anna/cordelia is just right there, look I just love anna lightwood a lot okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 21:21:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24812239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptidqueerreads/pseuds/cryptidqueerreads
Summary: Anna Lightwood loved sad girls. Perhaps it was starting to take a toll on her.
Relationships: Cordelia Carstairs/Anna Lightwood
Comments: 6
Kudos: 16





	drink the sun like wine

Anna Lightwood knew sad girls.

She knew how sadness flooded a person, became the rain and the ocean and the blizzard that they lost themselves in. She knew how many ways girls could wear their sadness, how some girls cloaked themselves in tears while others packed their sorrow into beautiful little vials to keep in their drawers, only to be taken out and lovingly handled on the blackest, loneliest midnights. She’d known the girls who turned their grief into armor, their skin turned to ice and iron, and the girls whose misery turned them to snow and porcelain, fragile and collecting dust on some man’s highest shelf. The girls who came to Anna all came with sadness, and they often left with more than they could bear. 

Anna Lightwood loved sad girls. Perhaps it was starting to take a toll on her.

Anna lifted her cheroot to her mouth, then let it fall again without inhaling. She’d made the mistake of leaving her flask lying on the table in her flat, filled with gin and now utterly useless to her. She briefly considered asking Matthew what he had on his person - Matthew Fairchild always had something on his person - then thought better of it. Matthew treated liquor like knives, as though if he poured enough down his throat it might one day show the world the damage he felt should be obvious. She liked Matthew; if she were being honest with herself, Matthew was likely her closest friend. Better to suffer the hideous boredom of another party than encourage his self-destruction.

The stone of the wall bit into her shoulder-blades through her clothes. Around her, the room swirled with brightly colored silks punctuated by dark jackets. At every wall, girls clustered around each other, hydrangea bloom dresses concealing whispers and giggles from the boys who lurked just far enough away to be admired. Matthew and his parabatai, James, weren’t among them, though that wasn’t uncommon. James Herondale didn’t have enough room in his head around all his romance and chivalry to think about preening for girls like Catherine Townsend or Rosamund Wentworth. 

Ariadne stood with them. Anna always knew where Ariadne stood. 

Pain pricked at her chest, a delicate reminder of what loving Ariadne Bridgestock had done to her. Sad girls, Anna mused, sad girls and their sad tales. She lifted the cheroot again, this time inhaling enough that she could pretend the constriction in her chest came from the smoke. Her eyes slid past Ariadne to Wentworth and Townsend. Both girls could be absolute vipers; there’d been more than one expensive dress that found itself accidentally ruined by Anna’s clumsy shoes, uncharacteristically smeared with mud, after she overheard them tittering amongst themselves about Matthew. On this particular occasion, they seemed to have snared a new prey. Laced up in a lavender gown trembling with beading, a girl Anna did not recognize gave them a thin smile.

There were not many ladies in London that Anna did not know. She shifted slightly against the wall, craning her neck as though searching out someone else entirely though her eyes stayed fixed on the stranger. The girl’s hair fell in dark curls, nearly black except where it glowed deep red in candlelight. Her golden skin spoke of a heritage rooted far from the hills of Wales and the sooty streets of London that gave Anna and most of her cousins their pale complexion, and the defiant lift in her chin might as well have been a beacon of her unfamiliarity with society. Her cheekbones were high, an elegant contrast to her striking eyes. Her hands, not delicately folded or fluttering like nervous birds as many girls’ were wont to do, occasionally shifted restlessly toward her hip. She must have been accustomed to wearing a sword, Anna realized. Another oddity, even for a Shadowhunter. 

The cluster of girls shifted. Anna caught sight of Lucie, pressed against the girl’s side and going furiously red in the face as Wentworth and Rosamund giggled. The new girl’s brows drew slightly in confusion. Likely the girls were having another go at Matthew, or at the new girl’s dress, or Lucie’s continued disinterest in sharing their obsession with boys. Girls like that rarely went more than a half hour without finding something new to tear apart.

“Still doing all right?” A voice at her shoulder nearly made her jump. An evening full of new experiences, then - Anna hadn’t been properly startled in years. 

“As well as can be expected,” she said smoothly to her father, who didn’t seem to have noticed her flinch. She turned her back on the girls to face him. “The Herondales do know how to provide an entertaining evening.”

Gabriel laughed. “At least your mother has been out of the party-throwing mood since the baby was born.”

Anna nodded her agreement and subtly dropped her cheroot into a nearby potted plant. Like many of Anna’s habits, Gabriel didn’t look favorably on her smoking, though he allowed her mother to deliver the blatant admonishments. “What is this one for, again?”

Gabriel frowned slightly out at the crowd, over Anna’s shoulder. “I believe it was to introduce the Carstairs, though I’ll admit the only one I’ve seen is the boy.”

“Carstairs?” The name rustled up a piece of news she'd heard and discarded as irrelevant. Lucie had told her, she recalled, about the friend who was coming to London to train to be her parabatai. There were other things, she remembered now, rumors of a disgraced father and a mother desperate to ingratiate her children into London society before a trial could be held and a name could be smeared. She followed her father’s eyes out to the dancing pairs, over Matthew and Lucie laughing together and Charles pretending to gaze adoringly at Ariadne, then looked back at where Lucie had been, where the new girl stood alone. 

“Ah! There’s the girl. Cordelia, I believe Will said her name was,” Gabriel said. He lifted his glass to his lips and raised his eyebrows to subtly indicate the new girl, who now was accepting an invitation to dance from James. 

“Oh, yes,” Anna said, practiced disinterest smoothing over her voice. “She and Lucie are to be parabatai, aren’t they?”

“I believe so. I expect her mother will want to rush it through, given her father’s trial.” Her father had caught sight of someone in the withdrawing room behind them, his attention already leaving Anna alone once again. “You’ll excuse me, dear. Come say hello to Arthur, when you’ve got a moment.” 

As he left, Anna returned her attention to the dance floor. Now the pairs whirled in a waltz, the music swaying and rising with the ruffles and taffeta. There were likely hours left to this, and she found herself reaching the end of her limits to polite society. As much as Shadowhunter society tolerated her behavior, there were no girls here who would dare dance with her, and most of the boys avoided her out of fear or insecurity, she didn’t care which. Matthew, it seemed, had become entirely engrossed in Lucie, and James held Cordelia in a way which suggested he had little interest in finding another partner. Even her brother, one of the other members of their little troupe, was nowhere to be found. 

Anna scanned the room one last time. She had spoken to everyone who would expect her to, she thought, but there was always one old tutor or friend of her father’s that she missed and heard all hell about later. But faces were blurring together, and she could see no one of importance. The only person who remained clear, her garnet hair flickering like embers as she danced, was Cordelia Carstairs. 

Anna allowed herself a moment of respite, letting her eyes focus on the girl. She watched her dance, watched her staring at James with the hopeless adoration of a girl reunited with the boy she loved in childhood. She would grow up, Anna knew, and realize that the world was never so simple, that people did not remain still and wait for you to arrive to love them. Anna had seen enough of the world to know how the hearts of men and women moved. Countless girls arrived at her doorstep for this precise reason. The thought normally brought pity at best and scorn at worst, for the girls who wept and wailed over the boys and girls whose fickle hearts betrayed them, but for Cordelia she only felt a pale wash of sorrow. It would be a shame, Anna thought, for such a beautiful girl to cry. 

Cordelia’s head turned, and over James’ shoulder her eyes swept the room, landing at last on Anna. Warmth rushed to pool in Anna’s chest, in her bones. The blurred faces around her turned to nothing more than painted wallpaper, a backdrop for the dancing girl in the center of the room. Out of reflex more than choice, Anna lifted one eyebrow in a silent greeting. For a single heartbeat, just long enough to tie Anna’s mind in an endless knot, Cordelia smiled at her. 

Then she was gone, vanished into the bustle of dresses and dancing. Anna turned toward the withdrawing room. She slipped one shaking hand into her pocket. Anna did not live well with certainty; her world existed in gray spaces and emotions with no names. But the feeling that settled in her chest could be nothing less than sure, no word less forceful than knowledge. 

Cordelia Carstairs didn’t carry her sadness. Whatever grief tried to fill her, she had wrested it into a weapon. It flashed out from her hip in shining gold, cleaving through bone and treachery. Her tears would not drown her but sustain her, provide soothing relief to her wounds before she returned to battle. 

Anna Lightwood loved sad girls. Perhaps it was time to love a girl who burned. 


End file.
